For-Profit Justice Means Taxing the Poor

When for-profit companies make money off the criminal justice system through privatization of prisons, it often triggers serious public debate. But there has been precious little scrutiny of local governments that use courts to make money for themselves. We should all be paying closer attention, because that kind of for-profit justice often means shifting public costs onto a community’s poorest members and creating perverse incentives for courts to ratchet up the pain.

From Ferguson to the suburbs of Atlanta, some municipalities and counties have turned their courts into veritable cash cows. They deploy a crushing array of fines, court costs, and other fees to harvest revenues from minor offenders that these communities cannot or do not want to raise through taxation. This is as dangerous and abusive as it is politically tempting.

Many public officials have embraced the idea that minor offenders should pay at least part of whatever it costs to bring them to book. But many courts now levy fees that are enormous in comparison to the punishments actually imposed for an offense. A resident of Montgomery, Alabama who commits a simple noise violation faces only a $20 fine—but also a whopping $257 in court costs and user fees should they seek to have their day in court. It’s a very short slide downhill from asking the courts to recover some of their costs to asking them to turn a profit and help fill up the municipal treasury.

While there are signs that long-overdue reforms may be coming to Ferguson, there are courts across the U.S. that seem bent on harvesting profits from the poor. The problem of revenue-driven courts has been not so much hidden as widely ignored.

This story ended badly for everyone involved. Offenders straining under the yoke of these costs sued the town, and a state judge condemned the whole operation as a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket." Harpersville wound up shutting down its municipal court entirely and was left scrambling to plug a gaping hole in its budget. In the end, the town did what it probably should have done in the first place—it passed a 1 percentage point increase in local property taxes to fund basic services the old-fashioned way. But many other towns in Alabama and other states are still doing exactly the same thing.